


monsters are real

by BlackJacketsandPens



Category: DmC: Devil May Cry
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 15:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3615243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackJacketsandPens/pseuds/BlackJacketsandPens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"When the people you’re supposed to trust most turn out to be demon scum… Your eyes really do open up to evil everywhere. I took a stand. Fought back, killed…no matter the consequences. So I chose my path, and I lived by it…"</em> An interpretation of Dante's life pregame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	monsters are real

They told him he’d been sick. ‘Meningitis’, or something like that. It was a weird word. But whatever the word was, it meant sick, and it meant there was no memories before the orphanage. All he had was the little red stone around his neck, and a seven year-old’s vague hope that the foggy ‘mom and dad’ he couldn’t quite recall would come get him.

The night he saw the head nurse turn into a monster, the night the world shifted and shook around him and went from dull and quiet and sane to loud and bright and topsy-turvy and the walls were alive and the nurse was a snake lady, the aides were clawed and fanged and monster, and they were eating a boy, an orphan, the sad little boy from the room next door….was the night his life changed.

He didn’t remember if he’d started screaming then or not, but they saw him and he ran and hid and cried and shook until the next morning, and he was punished for being out of bed after lights-out, and punished for other things, and things he didn’t do, but he knew he hadn’t been bad, he knew they knew, they knew that he saw what they were, and he wasn’t bad.

He wasn’t bad.  _They_ were bad. He was good. They were monsters.

It was two months later, he was in the closet they locked him in and listening to them eat another child, when he decided. He wasn’t going to let this happen anymore. He was the only one who could see — no one else saw the monsters. Only he did. So he had to protect the other kids.

He waited ‘til no one was watching, and crept into the kitchen to take a knife off the rack, hiding it in his shirt. And he waited until he could see the snake lady nurse as herself…and stepped on her tail. Hard. It took five times before she called him into her office, and the world did it’s darktobright shift, and he knew this was it.

He followed her in, and the knife came from his shirt, and her back turned, and he leaped on her like a frog and he tried to pretend it was just like poking a turtle with a stick but everything smelled copper and red and slickslimy and the snake was screeching so loud so loud like a siren it hurt his ears and they were coming, they were coming and he couldn’t kill them all so he dropped the knife — it slid out of his hand soaked with blood so much blood it was red and bright and shiny and all over him — and jumped out the window, glass shards tearing at his arms and face and legs, but he landed okay and  _ran_.

He ran and kept running, over the gate slipsliding over the black metal bars with blood all over his hands, on the sidewalk, run run run run run. The world kept changing around him, dark bright dark bright dark bright and he heard voices now, the city was alive, the whole city, not just the orphanage it was the whole world around him, alive and growling his name —  _Dante, Dante, you can’t run, Dante, you can’t hide, we see you_  — and he ran until his legs screamed in pain and his lungs were raw and breathing felt like he was choking on sandpaper, and he was eight years old and he’d killed a demon.

They found him half passed out in an alley, and he couldn’t fight when they took him away, he was so tired. So tired, and the city kept flickering darkbright behind his eyelids, but when he opened them it was the dark quiet city and the policeman wouldn’t listen to him. No, worse, he knew the policeman  _knew_ , he knew they did. They knew! 

If the  _policemen_ knew, then who else were monsters? 

Was everyone a monster?

He tried telling every policeman that talked to him, and then the lady in the nice suit who came. He told them about the monsters, about the bright talking city, he told them over and over until the words he said didn’t make any sense anymore, but they just shook their heads. They knew.  _They knew._

They were all bad guys, because they knew and they let the monsters keep eating people. They were bad guys, because the lady took him away to a hospital.

It wasn’t a normal hospital, it was the scariest place he’d ever been. The people there screamed and raved and howled and laughed and sobbed and threw themselves at the doors, banging and crashing and babbling nonsense and staring at him, staring right through him, and he felt like they could all rip him open and see his insides. They put him in a room and when he tried to get away they strapped him to the bed, and he struggled and wiggled and writhed until his wrists and ankles burned and bled, but he couldn’t get away, and they brought needles, needles filled with clear stuff that made his head fog and his eyelids heavy and thinking get slow and his body turn to limp jelly.

He fought anyway, he knew he had to, not to protect anyone, not anymore — if the world was all bad guys who knew, the only person that he needed to protect was himself. And he had to fight. He had to fight so they would stop giving him the clear stuff, so he could get away from the monsters, because there were monsters here, too, and the crazy people could see them, and he wondered how many people were really crazy, and how many just saw the truth, like him. He couldn’t save them though, he had to save himself.

They didn’t like him fighting, they took him from the bed with the leather straps and put him in a dark stone room, the monsters chained him there like a bad dog — and if they decided he was a bad dog then he’d  _be_ a bad dog, growling and biting and struggling and kicking until they started hitting him to make him stop. 

He decided the hitting was better than the needles. The hitting cleared his head, made him mad, made him sting and made him fight harder. They hit, he hit back. They dumped buckets of cold water on him, he laughed and thanked them for the bath. He fought with his smile, fought by trying not to care so hard that he really did stop caring. It hurt, it hurt, but the blows and bruises and bloody lips paled to the hurt that set deep in his bones and blood, that the world knew about monsters, the monsters were the people that were supposed to protect you from them, and because he saw they hated him.

It was a long time he was chained in the basement (four years), but then one day something in him shifted, the world went bright and loud and alive for the first time in ages, and the thing that came into the room wasn’t human-looking anymore, and he started to laugh, because maybe he was crazy, maybe he had finally accepted it and that’s why he saw, but then the monster growled and he growled back, and it hit him, and he swung up, kicked kicked grabbed its neck with his legs and squeezed til a snap and he let go and he’d killed another demon, and he wasn’t scared anymore because he could kill the monsters. 

It was a rush, knowing he could fight back and  _win_. He fought again, fought and fought as they took him somewhere else, a cell, a little cell in a little prison, and he just laughed and laughed and laughed as the policemen — the demons — hit him and pushed him around and made him do this and that and hit him and he didn’t know why they kept thinking they would break him. They tried and tried and all it did was make him stronger, every punch and blow healed and reinforced the armor he was building out of rage and hatred so hot he thought it would set his skin on fire, out of blood and bruises so numerous he lost count, out of busted bones and split lips and black eyes and bruised knuckles.

He made it a game. In and out and in and out, how many times could a trail of crimson copper and dead demons lead him out of jail — do not stop do not collect 200 dollars — and how many times could they catch him, drag him back while he fought and laughed and bled. The in-between times he spent in the streets, learning what he could, learning how to live on the edges when he couldn’t live anywhere else, couldn’t be where the demons were, and he saw now — he saw. They were everywhere. They were in the mall and the hospital and the schools and on the streets, the signs changed, the people changed, and no one ever saw a thing. So he had to stay away, stay out of the light, on the edge of darkness. 

He learned to live from bouncers and bartenders, from whores and junkies, from gangs and dealers. He tasted beer at thirteen, got shitfaced drunk the same night. Had his first fuck at fourteen, some blonde in scraps of pink lace in the bathroom of a bar, quick and violent like the rest of his life. Found the good side of needles when he was sixteen, high off his last great escape — lucky number eight — and getting even higher, the world bright and glittering and every nerve in his body alight with liquid burning energy.

He lived like that, then — fighting and fucking, drinking and shooting up, sleeping in back rooms and borrowed cars and on barroom floors and in alleys and finally in a white trash trailer on the end of the pier, shearing his hair punk-short to make it one less thing to worry about, hunting for the one place in a dozen that didn’t sell food that made him woozy and wobbly, didn’t sell food made to make you sheep, breathing nicotine easy as air. 

Why bother anymore? Why bother. The world was against him, his life proved that. Monsters were real, he fought them every day, and no one gave a single shit. No one cared about the boy who saw demons, except maybe the ones who wanted him dead. It was a miracle every day he opened his eyes and kept breathing, but the only one who cared was himself. And even then it was hard to do that much.

Drink and fuck and fight ‘til one day your heart stops, ‘til your body gives out. That’s how he would live. Because it’s not paranoia when the city itself screams death with your name on it, when you’re half sure every day you get up that you won’t live to see the next one. Live the day like it’s your last, because it probably is.

Lap up the violence like it was manna from heaven, laugh and shoot and inhale the cordite and gunpowder, blood and smoke, feel flesh against feet and knuckles and in between teeth biting down, taste copper and bile and black demon flesh — and pretend it didn’t terrify you to the depths of the soul you’re not sure you have, pretend you didn’t have nightmares where you looked in the mirror and saw a demon, pretend that there was nothing left in you but anger and hate and violence, that there wasn’t a scared little boy still in there somewhere that just wanted someone to understand.

He didn’t know if he was human. He didn’t know if he’d ever been, or if somehow he’d turned into a monster himself just by fighting them. If their plan the whole time was to make him one of them, make him what he hated most. After all, how could a human do what he did? Fight as hard, drink as much, smoke as much, take enough drugs to kill an elephant and get up the next day, have a broken bone heal in hours, run as long and as fast as he did? How could a human laugh as he ripped limbs and heads from bodies and how could a human revel as he did in blood and death and violence and rage?

He ripped his chest open when he was seventeen, one night in a dirty bar bathroom, letting his blood stain his fingers and biting through his lip as hand went into wound, touched hard bone and wet muscle and felt, felt, felt, til he touched the thing that beat, pressed fingers stick between ribs against the organ so he could hear the  _thumpthumpthumpthump_ in his ears of the thing he’d almost thought he didn’t have.

It only scared him a little, now, when the wound closed and vanished like it had never been here, seconds after his hand left it.

He was arrested again, soon after, dragged off and put somewhere he’d never been — a hell of ice and real life demons, proof at last of his sanity, proof he’d wanted but convinced himself he never needed. They were real, the others saw them. Prison guards and death sentences. No one left this place alive, and the first time he tried and woke up later lying in blood-soaked snow, he began to know why.

Years again passed, four years frozen and losing the battle with hope that had been ephemeral to begin with, spending his days trying to fight and only achieving getting beaten bloody, and nights shivering in an uneasy doze, huddled away from the other prisoners, for no one spoke the name  _Dante_ if they wanted to live another day.

But swift as lightning, sudden as an explosion, something changed his life again. A voice he somehow knew in his head, his red stone pendant (the one thing that mattered to him, the one thing that eased his inner maelstrom when hand wrapped around it at night) burning on his chest — and then fire in his veins, fire behind his eyes, heartbeat screaming in his ears, it burned it burned _it burned_  and he screamed and there was a weight in his hand, searing his palm like molten steel, and he screamed again, and  _moved._

He felt like Death, he felt like the Reaper, he felt like the world could come at him all at once and he’d laugh as he stood among the corpses, he felt like he was made of fire and screams and he didn’t come back to himself until the moon and rain hit skin oilslick wet with blood and he stood in the street in a downpour, sharp needles of ice cooling him and washing copper away even as he took deep desperate breaths and clutched the blade he held in a white-knuckled grasp.

The blade…he had no idea where it came from, no idea how to use it, but the long steel sword, black metal heavy in his hand, felt warm. Felt familiar. The mark on his back, the mark he’d had since he could remember seeing it a mirror, it warmed and the blade vanished, the instinctive knowledge that he could call it with a twitch of his fingers settling in.

It wasn’t much longer before they found him — the monsters and his past. Memories returned, a brother regained, and suddenly he had a purpose. A goal. A reason. A  _target_.

He walked in step with the only family he had left, the family who’d found him after fifteen years apart…and he wondered. They were fighting for freedom. They succeeded, they would be heroes, wouldn’t they? 

The man next to him, charismatic and immaculate, pale haired and clad in blue and black, katana in hand and hat on head — his brother, elegance and intelligence and charm…he was the one made to be hero. He was the one people would thank, and praise, and acknowledge. The presentable one, the man with the plan.

Not the skinny mess of a boy, all lean muscle and scrawny chest, clothes rumpled and faded, unlaced boots and battered jacket… He was dark where Vergil was light, dirty where he was clean, rude where he was polite. No one would want their hero to be a hedonistic, angry smartass who spent his days (when not in prison) drinking and fucking, who had a foul mouth and no education, who lived on greasy fried food and whiskey, and whose only talent was killing. 

He wasn’t even sure if anyone would want a  _brother_ like that; half-convinced he’d be dismissed, unloved, unneeded (he was a killer, after all, a bitter alcoholic felon, no one wanted that in their life) but desperate enough to ignore it and enjoy whatever little time he’d end up having.

No, he was no hero. He was just here to shed blood, pave his brother’s path to freeing them all. Just here for revenge, to kill his mother’s killer. That’s all. (Even if the girl with the magic paint was making him feel human again.)

Well…maybe he’d give it a shot.

Better than the rest of his life so far, right?


End file.
